Project Dastaan

In 2022 CAP hosted the screening of ‘Child of Empire’, an animated virtual reality documentary by Project Dastaan. This award-winning film has been screened at the V&A Museum, SOAS, Sundance Film Festival, and galleries and museums in South Asia.

Child of Empire, a core project of Project Dastaan, is a state-of-the-art animated virtual reality (VR) docu-drama about the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. The exhibition opened in Lahore at the NHM in November 2022 and was followed by a Q/A session between Project Dastaan Co-Founder, Saadia Gardezi, and CAP’s General Manager, Noor Ahmed. The exhibition is now a permanent feature at NHM, while the exhibition in Karachi opened to visitors in December 2022. 

CAP also moderated a webinar called ‘Mapping Stories of South Asia’, a conversation exploring transnational representation through filmmaking. The panel includes Sparsh Ahuja, Co-founder of Project Dastaan, Jawad Sharif, a Filmmaker, Navtej Purewal, and Eleanor Newbigin from Border Crossings, SOAS.

Project Dastaan is a peace-building initiative which examines the human impact of global migration through the lens of the largest forced migration in recorded history, the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.